


Burn

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bisexuality, Choices, F/M, Gen, M/M, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 22:39:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/667261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You still living with Ava?”</p><p>“I don’t know as you could call it living.  But I do abide.”</p><p>“In hope,” Raylan says.  “You told me once that you abide in hope.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burn

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to norgbelulah for helping with this!
> 
> This is an S2 AU, but the point of divergence from canon isn't really specific: think of it as an alternate season two entirely. Boyd is down in the mine, but Carol Johnson and heist requests aren't helping him out of it.

Black lung is called pneumoconiosis, or coal worker’s pneumoconiosis, and Boyd remembers being nineteen, buried alive with Raylan Givens, and telling him that.

“I’m surprised you don’t say it that way,” Raylan said. “Some kind of long tangle of a name that you trip on, seems about your type of thing.”

But Raylan mistook Boyd’s hillbilly eloquence, his Shakespeare-in-the-holler, Harlan blank verse, for a fondness for nothing more than big words. Boyd liked language like Mags’s apple pie: just sweet enough to burn. Pneumoconiosis wasn’t that. It was just a tin-can string of letters.

He’d told it to Raylan because he’d thought that Raylan, always wanting to pretend that things weren’t what they were, would like it.

When he was with Raylan, he didn’t call what they did love, either.

When Raylan was gone, Boyd went over to Mags Bennett and overpaid for three jars of homemade apple pie, and he sat in the back of his truck drinking until the heat burned away his longing. He woke up miles from Harlan with the smell of a girl on his fingertips and the taste of cinnamon on his tongue. But that was years ago now.

 

He wakes up in his borrowed bedroom at Ava’s and looks at the peeling plaster on the ceiling. When he gets a chance one day, he might drag a stepladder in and see what he can do about that. He spends a lot of his time at Ava’s doing what his daddy always called house shit: the endless work of stopping a roof from falling down on her head. He tightens pipes and repaints walls. One hot Saturday, he strips to the waist and sands down her porch until it’s as smooth as glass.

Ava tells him that he’s wasting his time. “There isn’t anything you can do that’s gonna make me forget what you’ve done,” she says, but she says it while she’d holding a glass of lemonade out to him. There are drops of condensation on the inside of her wrist and Boyd wants to lick it away, just go down on his knees in front of her and put his tongue to her pulse, taste the sugar and the sting of the lemon from where she’d squeezed them into the juicer, from where it had all soaked into her skin. He wants that as much as he’s ever wanted anything.

The day to day of his world is as narrow as a pinhole and as dark as his soul, but Ava is sunlight, and Boyd wants to burn.

He takes the lemonade. She makes it a little on the sour side. Maybe, though, that’s just for him.

 

“Your face is always dirty,” Ava says.

Boyd is wordless as he takes himself to the bathroom and scrubs until he can see his face again. It’s an undertaking each day, in the evening, to strip away the mine and find himself. Thus far, he has always been there, but he has had dreams that suggest it will not always be so: dreams where he can only see himself in the cat-scratch lines of the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, where the dust has broken away on its own. He wakes up from these dreams and breathes, his hands flat against the sheets. He can taste the mine in the back of his throat.

What theology he’s preserved is the theology of the cross. He still believes in suffering.

He comes back to Ava’s kitchen table with his face as clean as he thinks it will ever become, but if there is a woman in the world who will always see the dirt on him, it’s Ava Crowder, who might have been his sister and who is now wholly and entirely something else.

 

He sees Raylan’s silhouette at the mouth of the mine as he’s coming out. It’s been months, and Boyd is tired of living in the same house as the woman he loves, ground to dust under the millstone of her mistrust: he wants more than anything else to come out into the light and press his mouth against Raylan Givens’s neck and get himself someplace dark. Raylan never minded coal dust on his clothes and Boyd never minded the bruises on Raylan’s face: that was a deal they’d struck a long time ago, back when they were fucking and Boyd was memorizing the exact shape of Raylan’s mouth.

“I’d have thought,” Raylan says, “that you wouldn’t be here anymore.”

Boyd says, “Why, Raylan, where else would you think I could go?”

“Somewhere. Anywhere. Belize, maybe.”

“Well, you know how the song goes,” Boyd says, and hums it, throws a bar of it to Raylan, who won’t catch. Something’s amiss with him. “Should I ask you for a list of your troubles?”

“You could ask,” Raylan says, and his smile is the one Boyd fell in love with twenty years ago. “You still living with Ava?”

“I don’t know as you could call it living. But I do abide.”

“In hope,” Raylan says. “You told me once that you abide in hope.”

He hears the slur in the words now and knows what Raylan must have done to get himself here, to talk about the old days where anyone could hear him, and where Boyd would know what he meant. The wedding ring he had on his finger the last time Boyd saw him is gone now. And this is an offer, as plain and straightforward an offer as Raylan is capable of making him, and it is the same offer as before: he will not mind the coal dust if Boyd will not mind the bruises. Raylan is hurt and Boyd is dirty, but between them, friction’s always been enough to burn all that away.

Does he get what he wants? And what does he want?

And did Raylan find him at the bottom of that bottle or did he open it with him in mind?

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Boyd says.

Raylan nods slowly. He says, “She might come back,” and Boyd understands that their moment is already gone. He could say that they have both made their choices, but that isn’t so and never has been so: it’s always Boyd who’s been left, and left to make do. He loves Ava the way he loves Raylan, with an entirety of heart belied by the splitting of it, but he wishes, just once, that Raylan were his to take or give up as he would. That his part in their story was not always to be kind while being left.

But he looks at the paler circle around Raylan’s ring finger and knows that he has too much of an actor’s heart to refuse a part presented to him. He lays a claim to the similarities of women, as men so often do when they’re asked to stare down each other’s heartbreak, and says, “Ava let me in the house again.”

Raylan stands there for a moment. It’s too dark for Boyd to see his eyes.

What he says, when he does speak, is conciliation only, and if it’s too dark to see him, it’s too late, now, for Boyd to see if his memories of Raylan’s mouth have not eroded over the years. The sun has gone down on all of that.

“You were always bigger than Harlan County,” Raylan says. “If Ava takes you, you might want to have a look at the rest of the world.”

 

When summer comes, and Boyd paints the front porch, Ava’s lemonade is sweeter, and sometimes she sits on the swing he built and talks to him. She says the Cut ‘n Curl smells like cheap tonic and hair spray that stays with her so long she’s surprised it isn’t stripping the paint away as he lays it on, but all the same, no one ever died from working in a hair salon.

“That seems a waste of scissors,” Boyd says.

“All I’m saying is, Bowman said he wouldn’t work in a mine, and you’re twice the man he was.”

He can feel the sweat on the back of his neck and taste the sugar on his tongue. He says, “The mine’s just to have a place. And for penance.” His sins are inked into his skin and on the pages of books and buried in the woods.

“Well, you’ve paid,” Ava says. “Now come inside, Boyd.”

He leaves the paintbrush on the steps.

 

It’s a year before he realizes that Raylan didn’t leave him so much as give him away, and he understands that for all that lay between them, Raylan loved him still, that night, at sundown. Without meaning to, he made his choice after all. He was fooled by words and poetry: in Raylan saying his wife might come back, he mistook a caution for an obsession, and so lost what he hadn’t known himself to have.

He loves Ava, but he is troubled by how differently his life could have gone. He thought he would have known enough to see the fork in the road.

The next time he sees Raylan, he’s in Lexington, and Raylan’s leg is settled too casually against the leg of a man Boyd barely recollects, another marshal. Boyd thinks of jealousy and hope and time, the sundown of all their lives, the tastes of lemonade and whiskey, and this time he sees the fork and takes her hand. He nods to Raylan.

Their lives are all knotted together like cords, all different words for the same thing, and all the people Boyd Crowder has loved in his life have always been sweet, and have always burned, and he has always been the same. It’s enough consolation for one night, however it could strike him in the morning, and with Ava’s palm warm against his own, he is satisfied.


End file.
